#SaturdayStories: János

Throughout October we'll be sharing stories of people whose lives changed when they met Jesus. This is János's story.

I grew up in Hungary where I was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church as an infant for cultural reasons, even though my family are not Christians.

I had been thinking about Christianity for a couple of years after some difficulties in school because of my own sins and sins against me. I felt that I fell short before God and deserved his judgment.

As a result, I began going to a Roman Catholic Church on Sundays and reading through the Bible. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anyone there who could help me understand the gospel.

That all changed when I moved to East Asia to attend college. I had trouble finding a church until I became friends with a Kyrgyzstani Christian called Askatai. She invited me to her international church and I decided to go with her.

I attended for the first time on Easter Sunday, 2018. The pastor, Matt, introduced himself to me at the end of the service and asked me if I wanted to read Mark's gospel with him, which I did. This was the first time I heard and understood the gospel clearly.

Once I finished reading Mark, another friend, Jon from the US, read Philippians with me. I really enjoyed reading the Bible one-to-one with people, and I then met Jared, from Australia, and we decided to read through the book of James. During this one year period, I also started attending a Bible study led by Feng, from East Asia, where we studied Philippians, Exodus, Mark and Romans. This is life in an international church!

I read books from the book table and attended Sunday morning services each week. I had lunch nearly every Sunday with Christians from around the world who talked with me about the morning sermon and continued to proclaim the gospel to me. All the while, the church was gathering on Sunday evenings to pray for me and others like me.

Through all of this, I started seeing how God uses faith to transform Christians to become different.

Then, in Spring 2019, I attended the church’s Christianity Explored class. This was especially helpful as it was a very good summary of what I had been taught all along.

At some point in the last several months, God graciously converted me. In my testimony, which I shared before my church at my baptism just a few weeks ago, I explained:

“I got to understand very clearly God’s immeasurable grace towards us that he gave his only son Jesus Christ our Lord to die on the cross for sinners, who then rose from the dead, and this gospel message struck me for I believe as sinful humans Jesus Christ is the only way for us for salvation, so I put my trust in him.”

We're humbled that Christianity Explored played a part in János's story.

Will you set up a regular gift today to reach people like János? A regular gift to CEM will enable us to equip the global church to reach out to people like János with the gospel.